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Directing a child to set up a diagnostic test is one way to illustrate the ease of using a device. That’s the approach Biomeme took for its pitch on crowdfunding website AngeList. Biomeme co-founder Max Perelman’s cute-as-a-button 7-year-old daughter takes on the role of lab assistant.

The DreamIt Health Philadelphia graduate developed a test kit to identify the DNA or RNA signature of bacteria and viruses through blood, urine or saliva samples. The company raised about $1 million in a mix of debt and options, according to a Form D filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and received $400,000 from the Philadelphia area division of Ben Franklin Technology Partners, the economic investment arm for Pennsylvania.

Getting specialty medications can be a big hassle. Dozens of pages of forms are required. Patients rely on call centers to find out the status of their prescriptions, and can go days wondering exactly when the next refill is coming. What if you could handle it all, instead, with just a few clicks on a smartphone app?

That’s the kind of thing ZappRx, a recently-formed startup out of Cambridge, MA, is trying to do.

The statistics surrounding startup success are pretty daunting — in fact, of the 500,000+ businesses owners that launched companies in 2012, only a handful will ever achieve a fraction of the notoriety of famed CEOs like Zuckerberg, Dorsey or Karp.

When launching a startup, there are countless decisions to consider: number of founders, sources of funding, location and target market, to name a few.

This infographic takes a look at the statistics surrounding startups and examines how many of them actually manage to get off the ground.

Baltimore is known for being home to companies such as Under Armour Inc. (NYSE:UA) and McCormick & Co. (NYSE:MKC) and, of course, HBO’s “The Wire.” But a new survey suggests Baltimore also is a destination for high-salaried technology workers.

Baltimore in 2013 had the second-highest average salary for employees in the technology sector, according to jobs database Dice.com. The 2013 average salary for tech workers was $97,588 — a 0.3 percent decrease from the year before.

ROCK SPRING VENTURES,A LEADING EARLY-STAGE LIFE SCIENCE VENTURE CAPITAL FUND, IS NOW EPIDAREX CAPITAL

Our new name is inspired by Epidaurus, the home of ancient Greece’s first hospital and the temple of the Greek God of Medicine. It reflects our focus on innovation in the healthcare sector and our commitment to investing in young life science and health technology companies. Visit www.epidarex.com.

STAY TUNED FOR A NUMBER OF EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENTS THROUGHOUT THE COMING YEAR…

Johnson & Johnson ($JNJ) is the latest Big Pharma company that has vowed to open its clinical trial data vaults to the public. Going a step further than previous efforts, it’s enlisting the help of Yale University to manage data requests.

Under an agreement with the Yale School of Medicine, the school’s Open Data Access (YODA) Project will serve as an independent body to oversee requests from investigators and physicians looking to access anonymized clinical trial data from J&J’s Janssen. YODA, not J&J, will review each request and make final decisions on data sharing. Members of the YODA team will select and appoint an independent external panel of non-Janssen experts to help in some cases to assess requests.

Emergent BioSolutions Inc. announced today the closing of its previously announced offering of 2.875% Convertible Senior Notes due 2021 in a private placement to qualified institutional buyers pursuant to Rule 144A under the Securities Act of 1933. Emergent issued $250 million aggregate principal amount of its notes, which includes the additional $35 million principal amount of notes purchased by the initial purchasers under the exercise of the option granted to them by the company.

Emergent intends to use a majority of the net proceeds from the offering to finance the acquisition of Cangene Corporation, announced in December 2013. The company intends to use any remaining net proceeds from the offering for general corporate purposes, which may include repaying outstanding indebtedness under its existing credit facility.

Please join us for the 7th Annual Health Information Technology (HIT) Day of advocacy in Annapolis. Our agenda is focused on ‘HIT in Action! Consumer Engagement’ where we will showcase the perspectives of consumers using HIT today as well as their future hopes, concerns, and the value derived from accessing one’s health information as the healthcare industry transforms.

We are finally hosting the FLC’s National Meeting (Federal Laboratory Consortium) here in Montgomery County! This program gives our local companies easy access to federal labs from across the country. As part of a triple opportunity, the FLC is helping to sponsor the Post Doc Conference (April 24) – and MEDA (Maryland Economic Development Association) has chosen tech transfer as their theme for this year’s Annual Conference (April 27-29). Three great programs all within one week!

We really want to spread the word about our area’s terrific connectivity with the federal labs, and would appreciate your assistance. Attached is the flyer, the program is posted on the DED calendar, and you can access more information about the agenda and registration at www.federallabs.org. Note: The biggest opportunity for our companies is on April 23rd which is Industry Day – so a one-day registration may work well for some businesses.

Noble Life Sciences (Gaithersburg, MD), in collaboration with IBT Bioservices (Gaithersburg, MD), announces a newly optimized cotton rat model for preclinical studies of RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) therapies and vaccines. The companies jointly developed the model of RSV infection in the cotton rat and demonstrated its use to evaluate the efficacy of test compounds in RSV challenge studies.

Cotton rats are the gold standard for preclinical development of drugs and vaccines for RSV. The cotton rat gained importance for RSV studies because the permissiveness of cotton rats to infection with human RSV surpasses that of mice by more than 100-fold and because the model replicates several characteristic features of the human disease. Moreover, the predictive quality of the model is so high that treatments for severe disease advanced to clinical trials based on the results of efficacy and safety studies using cotton rats without the need for testing in primates.